How to support me!
I have a Patreon page! It's in patreon.com/fluscim.
1) You can become my patron, paying me whatever amount of money you can and want to. You can also tell your contacts about the patreon page (above) or about this blog: fluscim.blogspot.com. Thanks in advance!
2) I will keep publishing things here in this blog, immediately after publishing them in Patreon, because frankly I don't see the point of writing for a few. The way I plan to do this is I'll go through my twitter timeline and select things that could be expanded.
How many posts? I won't be able to write many posts. Maybe one every few days? You can tell Patreon that you want to pay say 3 pounds per post for a maximum of 2 posts a month. That way, if I do write 2 posts, you'd give me 6 pounds. But if I go crazy (or the pandemic demands it) and produce say 20 posts in a month, you'd still give me 6 pounds - you're in control.
Thank you in any case!
---
So, here's my story:
A personal story
This is the first time I try Patreon, but I hope it will be straightforward enough.
My intention is to request some support for work that I intend to be doing anyway, and that will be available for all anyway. (Obviously, if I do any consulting work on the side, I'd be paid separately, as that's not Patreon. But even then, I'd insist on staying free to post anonymised summaries of my work so that its essence is available for all.)
For now, let me tell you my story, in case anyone finds it interesting, and for me to test the waters with Patreon. On we go...
I worked as an Epidemiologist for 28 years. During that time, we developed a sentinel network in an archipelago (several islands) with 2 million people.
What's a "sentinel network"? It's one of the many ways that people in public health set up to do "epidemiological surveillance", that is, to learn how a disease goes up and down over time, say flu during the weeks of winter. It is a sample of all the GPs and paediatricians in primary care in an area, who voluntarily give information about one or more diseases. That information is of course anonymous, because we're not interested in the identity of the patient. We're interested in other details: the age of the patient, whether they have been vaccinated, whether they have chronic diseases, etc. And some times samples are taken and sent to the lab. That way, the information from the sentinel network is more "colourful" than the information given by the generality of primary care doctors.
As part of my work, in 1998, when H5N1 appeared, I started learning about flu pandemics. I was quite unknowledgeable about pandemics to begin with, because the last one had been when I was 6 years old (in 1968, you do the maths). With some study, I eventually found the flu virus to be fascinating, and the inevitability of a new pandemic at the very least ... intriguing.
In 2005, when the H5N1 "bird flu" reemerged, I decided to edit the H5N1 wikipedia page. A wikipedia editor reversed my changes because I hadn't added a link to WHO, and told me "we don't accept rumours". So I re-did the entry, adding a link and some more comments.
Later, I told promedmail.org (ProMED is an initiative to monitor emergent diseases) about my experience, suggesting real experts to add information to that page. My suggestion was published as part of their emails; later I haven't been able to find that post, but I have a copy somewhere.
In any case, and I don't know how, the initiative got picked up by Jamais Cascio who published it here: http://www.openthefuture.com/wcarchive/2005/06/getting_smart_about_disasters.html
After that, I received an email by Dr Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT on twitter), about a wiki that was being created. This was FluWiki, and it was later complemented by a forum which ended up being used more.
I joined under a silly username ("lugon", duh), as I wanted to be able to ask really dumb questions, such as "how is flu transmitted, really?".
My being anonymous proved enormously useful as, really, no one knew much about how to plan for a pandemic, as it was, for all of us, our first time. Under my user name, I remember being able to help others, and even generate some sense of hope, thanks to my knowledge of thinking tools. Specifically, I remember someone said: "I love your can-do attitude". And that obviously touched me, since I remember it to this day.
From FluWiki I learned a new respect for interested citizens, who may not know a lot about flu or pandemics to begin with, but who ask and really want to understand in order to act. Much of my understanding about how society reacts started there.
And that's the core of public health: information for action. So it made total sense to do it that way. I found it was an amazing model.
On the other hand, me coming from Europe, I never really got all the “prepper” thing. The "prepper" thing can be described in an exaggerated way with the phrase "a tone of tuna and a box of ammo" (food and weapons). Weapons or not, I strongly believed a more cooperative approach was needed. There was something in between official action and individual action that was missing. The expression used at the time was that governments sometimes drop a 60 meter rope down a 100 meter cliff.
How do you fill that gap? Some ideas emerged, at least as far as I know, in FluWiki. Or at least seemed to make it to FluWiki very fast. Thinkers wanted to know if the ideas were workable, I suppose.
Meanwhile, in my day job, I did much of the planning for a flu pandemic in my region, and even helped a bit at the national level (a couple of comments to the NPI document).
At the end of Flu 2009, I was commissioned by a government agency to write a plan for the Macaronesian islands, so I wrote what eventually ended up in http://resiliencemaps.org/files/fluscim.
In the process, I had lots of conversations with Vinay Gupta (@leashless and creator of the hexayurt). Vinay asked me many questions, again forcing me to learn a lot, and wrote his "Severe Pandemic" paper. He ended up creating the Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps (SCIM) model, which is at the core of http://resiliencemaps.org.
After that, I wrote 3 inter-related pieces for The Future We Deserve (also started by @leashless):
- The Onion and The Satellite, about the insufficiency of healthcare systems.
- No island is an island, about sustainability.
- My ideal panflu, about how to prepare for a severe flu pandemic.
I also tried to think about a "pandemic flu game" (#PandemicFluGame on twitter), with no success at all.
Now I’m quite active on http://twitter.com/lucasgonzalez. My current idea is to use this Patreon account to allow me to put more energy into twitter and a blog http://fluscim.blogspot.com.
I would probably do it anyway (because this thing deserves our best effort), but if I'm supported I'll be able to give it more time and mindspace, curating what I write into twitter as impromptus into a more coherent and useable form.
So, enough about where I come from, and what you might expect from me.
(If you're contributing to my patreon account (patreon.com/fluscim) at whatever level, thank you! Let's see how this works! If not, no worries. I'd do this anyway.)
For now, let me tell you my story, in case anyone finds it interesting, and for me to test the waters with Patreon. On we go...
I worked as an Epidemiologist for 28 years. During that time, we developed a sentinel network in an archipelago (several islands) with 2 million people.
What's a "sentinel network"? It's one of the many ways that people in public health set up to do "epidemiological surveillance", that is, to learn how a disease goes up and down over time, say flu during the weeks of winter. It is a sample of all the GPs and paediatricians in primary care in an area, who voluntarily give information about one or more diseases. That information is of course anonymous, because we're not interested in the identity of the patient. We're interested in other details: the age of the patient, whether they have been vaccinated, whether they have chronic diseases, etc. And some times samples are taken and sent to the lab. That way, the information from the sentinel network is more "colourful" than the information given by the generality of primary care doctors.
As part of my work, in 1998, when H5N1 appeared, I started learning about flu pandemics. I was quite unknowledgeable about pandemics to begin with, because the last one had been when I was 6 years old (in 1968, you do the maths). With some study, I eventually found the flu virus to be fascinating, and the inevitability of a new pandemic at the very least ... intriguing.
In 2005, when the H5N1 "bird flu" reemerged, I decided to edit the H5N1 wikipedia page. A wikipedia editor reversed my changes because I hadn't added a link to WHO, and told me "we don't accept rumours". So I re-did the entry, adding a link and some more comments.
Later, I told promedmail.org (ProMED is an initiative to monitor emergent diseases) about my experience, suggesting real experts to add information to that page. My suggestion was published as part of their emails; later I haven't been able to find that post, but I have a copy somewhere.
In any case, and I don't know how, the initiative got picked up by Jamais Cascio who published it here: http://www.openthefuture.com/wcarchive/2005/06/getting_smart_about_disasters.html
After that, I received an email by Dr Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT on twitter), about a wiki that was being created. This was FluWiki, and it was later complemented by a forum which ended up being used more.
I joined under a silly username ("lugon", duh), as I wanted to be able to ask really dumb questions, such as "how is flu transmitted, really?".
My being anonymous proved enormously useful as, really, no one knew much about how to plan for a pandemic, as it was, for all of us, our first time. Under my user name, I remember being able to help others, and even generate some sense of hope, thanks to my knowledge of thinking tools. Specifically, I remember someone said: "I love your can-do attitude". And that obviously touched me, since I remember it to this day.
From FluWiki I learned a new respect for interested citizens, who may not know a lot about flu or pandemics to begin with, but who ask and really want to understand in order to act. Much of my understanding about how society reacts started there.
And that's the core of public health: information for action. So it made total sense to do it that way. I found it was an amazing model.
On the other hand, me coming from Europe, I never really got all the “prepper” thing. The "prepper" thing can be described in an exaggerated way with the phrase "a tone of tuna and a box of ammo" (food and weapons). Weapons or not, I strongly believed a more cooperative approach was needed. There was something in between official action and individual action that was missing. The expression used at the time was that governments sometimes drop a 60 meter rope down a 100 meter cliff.
How do you fill that gap? Some ideas emerged, at least as far as I know, in FluWiki. Or at least seemed to make it to FluWiki very fast. Thinkers wanted to know if the ideas were workable, I suppose.
Meanwhile, in my day job, I did much of the planning for a flu pandemic in my region, and even helped a bit at the national level (a couple of comments to the NPI document).
At the end of Flu 2009, I was commissioned by a government agency to write a plan for the Macaronesian islands, so I wrote what eventually ended up in http://resiliencemaps.org/files/fluscim.
In the process, I had lots of conversations with Vinay Gupta (@leashless and creator of the hexayurt). Vinay asked me many questions, again forcing me to learn a lot, and wrote his "Severe Pandemic" paper. He ended up creating the Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps (SCIM) model, which is at the core of http://resiliencemaps.org.
After that, I wrote 3 inter-related pieces for The Future We Deserve (also started by @leashless):
- The Onion and The Satellite, about the insufficiency of healthcare systems.
- No island is an island, about sustainability.
- My ideal panflu, about how to prepare for a severe flu pandemic.
I also tried to think about a "pandemic flu game" (#PandemicFluGame on twitter), with no success at all.
Now I’m quite active on http://twitter.com/lucasgonzalez. My current idea is to use this Patreon account to allow me to put more energy into twitter and a blog http://fluscim.blogspot.com.
I would probably do it anyway (because this thing deserves our best effort), but if I'm supported I'll be able to give it more time and mindspace, curating what I write into twitter as impromptus into a more coherent and useable form.
So, enough about where I come from, and what you might expect from me.
(If you're contributing to my patreon account (patreon.com/fluscim) at whatever level, thank you! Let's see how this works! If not, no worries. I'd do this anyway.)
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